


I Know Places

by Qzil



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Community College, F/M, Hunting, Mild Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:23:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3634818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qzil/pseuds/Qzil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Leave me alone,” he growls. Meg laughs, unafraid. She is a predator, the top of the food chain, and he is only prey. <br/>“Run with me,” she tells him. “It doesn’t have to be the full moon. Run with me.”<br/>“I can’t,” he protests. <br/>“What are you so afraid of?” Meg asks. “It’s a gift, Castiel.”<br/>“It’s a curse,” he spits, confirming her suspicions. “I don’t want it.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know Places

She meets him at the college.

Well, smells him out, really. She’s standing in the parking lot, a cigarette dangling from her fingers when she smells it through the bitter reek of smoke. The wind blows away from her, and she’s sure that she must be mistaken, that her family are the only ones in town, when the wind changes and she smells it again.

She throws her cigarette to the ground to better focus on the smell and moves toward it, knowing that he can smell her, too. She expects to meet him halfway, to find him moving toward her with his nose in the air, looking for her, too.

Instead, she sees him running, his trench coat flapping in the wind. But she is impossibly fast, faster than even her brother, and catches him easily. She grabs the sleeve of his coat, forcing him to stop even as he tries to jerk his arm from her. If she was an ordinary human, or hadn’t spent her childhood tumbling with Tom and the others, he could’ve gotten away. But she’s strong, even for their kind, and he cannot.

He turns around instead, poised to fight, and Meg finds herself looking into impossibly blue eyes that remind her of the summer sky above her family’s farm.

“I know what you are,” she says. “You know what I am, too. You can smell me. Don’t lie.”

He’s trembling under her touch, and Meg has to fight the urge to laugh when he speaks. “Don’t hurt me.”

“I won’t,” she promises, surprised by her own words. “Where’s your pack?”

“Shifters don’t have packs,” he snaps at her. This time she laughs.

“Who told you that?”

His trembling grows worse. “My father.”

Meg laughs again. “Is that why you’re so far from home? We know all the shifters in the area, and you definitely aren’t one.”

He doesn’t answer, but simply pulls his arm from her grasp. “Please, leave me alone. I don’t want…”

“The full moon’s coming,” she says. “You’ll need somewhere to run.”

“No,” he answers. “I won’t.”

.

He avoids her after that, or tries to. Their town is small, and so is everything in it, including the rural college. She wonders why he chose their small town, and figures that he probably hoped or assumed that, with such a small population, there weren’t any other shifters.

She doesn’t even learn his name until two days before the full moon. Ruby, the small werefox that sometimes runs with her family, says she learned it from a friend of a friend who has classes with him.

_“Castiel,”_ she whispers, leaning over Meg’s ancient kitchen table. “What a strange name.”

“He’s a strange shifter,” Meg answers.

Ruby shrugs. “I wonder what he changes into.”

“A bird,” Meg says without thinking. His impossibly blue eyes come to mind, and she just knows that, on full moon nights, his arms become wings and he sails up into the dark sky. She wonders if he’s ever flown during the day.

She could be a bird, too, if she wanted. She could be anything she wanted.

Ruby makes a noise halfway between annoyance and disgust. “Well, you know how _those_ people are.”

Meg does. She’s met a few shifters in her time that turn into animals with wings, werebats and wereowls and even a werepigeon, and she’s found them all pathetic. Over time they changed, spending days staring at the sky as if they were bewildered to find themselves on the ground, longing to fly.

“Well,” Ruby continues. “At least he’s not a _pig.”_

Meg shudders. Prey animals are almost as bad as birds, in her opinion. Shifters take on the characteristics of their go-to animals, she knows, and prey animals are the worst of all. When she was fourteen, her father had taken her to meet a small colony of weremice, and it was then she learned that there were shifters and there were _shifters,_ and her family, without question, were the better kind.

.

“Run with us,” she suggests the day before the full moon. “We have plenty of land north of here, outside of town. There’s woods and streams and a field. Run with us.”

“I can’t,” Castiel says, and once again Meg finds herself looking into his blue eyes. She looks at his face as if for the first time, takes in the red-rimmed eyes and the dark purple shadows under them, sees the overgrown stubble on his jaws and _knows._

“You can’t take that,” she tells him. “You _can’t._ It’s _wrong.”_

“I do it all the time,” he says, voice firm, and Meg rethinks her opinion on his go-to shift. She can’t smell exactly what he is, like she can with Ruby, and figures that he’s like her, a shifter among shifters, _pure._

He has a choice in what he becomes.

“You shouldn’t,” she says, suddenly angry. She opens her mouth and draws in a deep breath, testing the air, and recoils. She can smell the brew on him that suppresses the change, and it makes her want to rage and hit him. The brew is vile, wrong, an offense to everything they are. “Mother nature gave us this gift for a reason. To throw it out like that…”

“I don’t want to be a shifter,” he tells her. “Leave me alone. I don’t want any of this. I want to be normal.”

_Prey,_ she thinks. _You’re_ prey. _You’re not like me._

“You’re disgusting,” she tells him instead.

“I want a _life,”_ he retorts.

.

Her father promised her a mate when she was nine.

It had never happened. They had traveled to various communities, meeting different shifters and wereanimals, coming away more and more disheartened, until he’d stopped when she was seventeen. Tom had never found one, either. His first mate had left him shortly after she’d gotten pregnant, only wanting a child with the shifter gene. His second one had left after she had miscarried, for the better of the species.

Meg has high hopes for Ruby. Only the firstborn child of a pure shifter couple gets the blessing, she knows. Although people like Castiel probably view it as a curse, if she’s reading him right.

She’s given up hope of ever finding a mate, if she’s honest. She knows that she could get one easily, if she really wanted. She’s pretty enough for a human, she supposes. Her hair is long and dark, her skin pale an unblemished, her face round and her body curvy, and her eyes are as dark as her hair.

But it’s her go-to shift that makes her special, her father always tells her, and she believes him.

They gather the next night at the homestead, her and Tom and her father and Ruby. She waits patiently for her grandfather to join them as he hobbles out of the house with his cane, and knows that Lucifer Masters will be as graceful as a young man once the moon hits him.

She gives herself over to it when it does, having already shed her clothes. None of them are shy about nudity, and never have been. Her mind turns to Castiel before the moon turns, shivering and sick somewhere inside, resisting the call of nature, and wonders if he’d blush if he saw her here, clothed only in moonlight.

But then she feels her bones begin to move under her skin and she had no time to think of anything. All around her the others begin to change, sending a small whispering throughout the yard and bringing the smell of magic to her nose. It washes over her like a warm rain, her whole body heating up with the pleasure of it and she crouches on the ground, gives herself over to the magic and the moon and feels _alive._

When she rises, bigger and stronger and covered in fur, sharp teeth glinting in the moonlight, she roars. There’s a puddle of rainwater on the ground, and she catches her reflection in it and sees herself, her real self, staring back at her, green eyes and triangular face and black fur. Her grandfather comes to stand with her, and his muzzle shows signs of aging, with gray fur spotting his sleek black pelt, but she does not mind.

Out of their whole family, Meg is the only one to inherit his go-to shift. They stand, side by side in the moonlight, her grandfather’s body only slightly larger than hers. She looks at her family, at Tom with his gorgeous mane and her father with his spotted golden pelt, and feels her heart swell in her chest.

She is a panther, and she is powerful and wild and everything a shifter should be.

Ruby yips, her reddish mouth opening to show off her pointed teeth, and playful runs to Meg’s side, and Meg knows that the girl is just as happy as she is to be back in their real bodies, back to their real senses.

The smells of the night invade her nostrils, leaves and dirt and rivers and _forest._ There is prey there, too, rabbits and squirrels and even deer, and Meg lets the scents roll over her tongue until there is nothing left but the animal inside of her and the human is gone.

Her grandfather moves silently for the trees, and they begin their hunt.

.

The next two days are blissful, filled with mornings dozing in the house and nights hunting in the woods, sometimes with her family and sometimes alone. Ruby leaves on the fourth morning with twigs in her hair and a smile on her face, and Meg, full to bursting from the deer they’d caught, feels perfectly content.

Until she reaches the school and sees Castiel.

He seems worse for the wear, the shadows under his eyes so dark that he looks half a corpse. He walks with slow, jerky motions, and looks like he wants to snap at anyone who speaks to him.

Meg corners him in the parking lot. She knows his scent now, almost as well as she knows Ruby’s and her family’s.

“I told you,” she says. “I _told_ you.”

“Leave me alone,” he growls. Meg laughs, unafraid. She is a predator, the top of the food chain, and he is only prey.

“Run with me,” she tells him. “It doesn’t have to be the full moon. Run with me.”

“I _can’t,”_ he protests.

“What are you so afraid of?” Meg asks. “It’s a gift, Castiel.”

“It’s a curse,” he spits, confirming her suspicions. “I don’t want it.”

“Well, you have it.”

.

He comes to her a week later as she smokes between classes. She always comes to the edge of the parking lot, where there’s a small stand of trees, and waits there instead of indoors. The smell of it, cleaning products and unwashed bodies and paper and pencils, is too much for her to take. The trees are better, cleaner, and smell like full moon nights, of family and hunting and _life._

It must smell like that to him, too. The moment he steps under the leaves, he seems to relax. The tension fades from his face, making him seem younger, better-looking.

“What?” she asks, blowing smoke in his face. His nose wrinkles.

“That smells vile.”

“I know.”

“Shifters are alone,” he says. “That’s what my father told me. Shifters don’t have packs.”

“They have communities,” she points out.

Castiel nods. “I don’t want that life. I realized that I didn’t…”

“You were kicked out,” she guesses. He nods.

“I met some friends. From outside,” he explains. “They were humans, good ones. They sent me here, after, to stay with a man they call their uncle.”

“Just because one community got rid of you doesn’t mean another will,” she says, then casually offers him her cigarette. He declines, but sits on the ground instead. His eyes close and his head tips back, mouth open as he draws in the scents around him.

“They showed me a different way of thinking, and I was punished for it,” he explains. “I didn’t want… There was this girl. I was supposed to breed her, to continue the line. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want the rules, the mate swapping and the hierarchy. They aren’t like packs, of course, but there’s always a leader that has to be obeyed, and I…”

“You don’t want a packmaster,” she finishes for him.

“I can’t run with you. I can’t run with anyone. I can’t do that again. Please, stop asking me.”

She takes another drag of her cigarette and blows the smoke away from him, not sure if she should be amused or disgusted by him.

“That doesn’t mean you have to reject your gift completely,” she says instead. “You’re a coward.”

He grows angry, then. “I just want to be normal, Meg. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“We’re better than normal,” she argues. “You think your little human friends wouldn’t be beating the shit out of each other to spend one night as us at the full moon?”

Meg leaves, not waiting for his answer.

.

Shifters are Mother Nature’s children.

Meg could look at a picture of a saber-toothed tiger and become one, or a dodo bird, or anything warm-blooded. Anything alive or extinct is hers to take, her skin to slip into and claim as her own, if only for a few hours, and to her it is the most beautiful thing in the world.

She does it, later, thinking of Castiel and his rejection of Mother Nature’s gift. She goes into the woods behind her house and strips, shivering slightly in the autumn air as the weak sunlight plays through the trees, and closes her eyes, concentrating hard. Magic fills her body, making her skin hum, and her bones shift and slide painlessly under her skin.

She opens her eyes and the world is so much _more._

She spends the night running through the woods, shifting between human and animal. The wind stings her eyes and branches make her feet bleed, opening wounds that stay with her as she moves between forms, from fox to human to lion and back to human again. She moves through predators easily until she reaches the town and takes the form of a common house cat, so much smaller than her usual form, but so much like her panther self that it feels almost right.

The sliver of the moon rises high above her, and Meg knows that her body will be exhausted tomorrow, that she will miss class and spend the day in bed, cursing her own stupidity. But for now the quiet and the smells of town drives the human thoughts from her head.

She runs swiftly, avoiding other animals and humans, and finds herself on the other edge of town. She kills a mouse and eats it, and buries the evidence when a familiar scent reaches her nose.

She turns and hisses at Castiel when she sees him at the entrance to Bobby Singer’s property.

He looks at her, head tilted and eyes narrowed into slits, and sniffs the air. “Meg?”

She hisses again and swipes a paw at his hand when he moves as if to pet her. But in a moment his fingers are at the scruff of her neck and he’s lifting her off of the ground, one hand under her bottom, and she snarls. Magic moves within her, and Castiel is forced to drop her to the gravel as she changes. When she’s finished she looks up at him, panting and naked in the faint moonlight, and smiles despite herself when she sees him blush.

“You’re… you’re a _cat?”_ he asks.

“Sometimes,” she answers. Meg stands and brushes the gravel from her knees, frowning in distaste when it sticks to the underside of her feet. “I like cats.”

“What are you doing here?”

Meg shrugs, unbothered by her nudity. “I was out for a walk.”

“Do you often walk in your other skin when it isn’t the full moon?”

She nods. “I feel more like _me.”_

He nods, then, as if he understands. But Meg knows that he doesn’t, really. How could he, when he’s rejected his gift so thoroughly?

“You should go, before someone sees you,” he suggests. “There’s…you could shift behind the gate.”

“It’s nearly three in the morning, Castiel. No one’s out,” she tells him. She crouches on the ground, preparing to change, and glances up at him through her lashes.

“What are you doing out?”

“There are some good memories of the middle of the night,” is all he says. “Goodnight, Meg.”

Even though she hates it, she changes into an eagle, needing to get home faster. She takes off before she can look back at him and soars high above the trees and houses, the wind moving sweetly under her wings.

.

Castiel seeks her out again at school a week later, before Thanksgiving break. “I could do it, I think.”

“Do what?” she asks, settling back against a tree. The sunlight shines through the bare branches, casting a pattern on her jeans.

Castiel shrugs and sits with her. “Shift. I could do it again. If I wasn’t, I mean, I can’t be…”

“You’ve never shifted alone,” she guesses. He nods.

“But I can’t do it with a… group.”

“What do you shift into, anyway?” she asks. “Is it a bird?”

“Sometimes,” he admits. “But it’s… dangerous. To be a bird all the time, I mean. You know that.”

Meg nods. She does. It had taken her two days to feel grounded after her last adventure, still convinced that she could feel the wind under her wings even when she was on the ground.

“So, what is it? Or do I want to be surprised?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t.”

He looks away, blushing. “A bobcat.”

“Well, that’s new,” she says. “I’ve never met a shifter that’s a bobcat. And I’ve met a lot of shifters.”

“My sisters always made fun of me. Well, except for Hael. But she’s… she’s a deer, so.”

Meg nods again. “I know about prey animals.”

“Deer can be fierce, though, if you anger them.”

“True.” Meg pauses, then lights a cigarette. “But, hey, anything’s better than a Werewolf, huh?”

This time, Castiel laughs. It makes his face light up, and Meg realizes that it’s the first time she’s ever seen him look happy, alive.

“Yes. Anything’s better than a Werewolf.”

.

Castiel arrives at her family’s property at the appointed time, wearing less layers than she’s used to seeing him in. Meg meets him in the yard, wearing only an old dress. Her bare feet stir up dust on the drive, the grass long ago flattened and chased away from generations of shifters changing on it.

The sun rises behind his truck, and all around her Meg can hear the nocturnal creatures of the forest bedding down while others stir. Birds call to their young and deer move among the foliage and Meg’s skin itches and tingles with the urge to run and run and run until her legs will not support her.

Castiel exits his truck and removes his shoes, cautiously placing them next to her on his front steps. Meg lights a cigarette. The bitter smell fills her nostrils and grounds her, bringing her back to humanity as the smoke burns her lungs.

“You sure you wanna do this?” she asks.

Castiel nods. “I think you’re right. That I need to embrace my gift, instead of chasing it away. I can have both, if I wish. You do. I’ve seen you at school, and your brother in town. You have friends, and jobs, and lives. But you still shift.”

“Yeah,” Meg says quietly. “We still shift.”

She does not tell him that he is wrong. There is no normal life for them, for their kind. There is the human flesh, but underneath there is always the beast, waiting to break through and run free. They can never be human, not truly.

She looks at him and sees the truth in his eyes, that he knows, but he is content to pretend. They’re both cats, two of a kind, and too smart for their own good.

There are shifters and there are _shifters_. And Castiel, if he is careful, if he can accept the truth and embrace Mother Nature’s gift, can become a _shifter._

She throws her cigarette into the dirt and stands. “Shift with me. Run with me.”

“No one will see us?” he asks.

Meg shakes her head. “I promise. I know a few places we can hide.”

He nods, and begins to undress, politely turning his back to her. He takes his time, carefully undoing the buttons of his flannel shirt and folding it before moving to his jeans, folding them, too, when he’s finished. Meg carelessly pulls her dress over her head and flings it onto the porch. Already she feels more free, less human, and can feel magic singing in her blood.

She knows that Castiel can feel it, too, by the way he stiffens. Suddenly he moves as fast as she did, whipping  off his boxers and crouching in the dirt. Meg follows him while the air changes, fills with magic and the scent of fur and cat. The sunlight hits them fully, warming her flesh as much as the change does, and in a moment she stands on four paws, inhuman and beautiful.

Castiel is, too. He’s smaller than her, of course, but no less breathtaking. His pelt is sleek and shiny, the spots standing out on his sandy fur. His large paws leave deep imprints in the dirt that has already seen so many paw prints.

But it is his eyes that capture her most. For the first time since she met him, they shine clearly, like a shroud has been lifted from him. He looks, for the first time, alive.

And she feels it, too. Life sings in her blood as she turns and disappears into the trees, Castiel on her heels. They run together through the forest, weaving between trees and bushes and plants, startling wildlife that they could hunt but not caring that they do. He runs ahead of her, belly low to the ground and ears back on his head, and Meg swears that she can almost hear him laughing.

They roar and race and play in the sunlight, chasing each other through the small streams and paths that wind through the forest until they both stop suddenly, catching the same scent.

Meg spies the deer just as it smells them and poises itself to run. But together they are too quick, and smarter than the average hunter. The deer dies under their jaws, and they feast together, covering their faces in blood as the kill hums in their veins and excitement from the hunt pounds in their hearts.

They gorge themselves before moving on, sharing the kill equally before they leave the remains rotting in the sun. There is no guilt at the waste of the flesh, not when there are other animals, real animals, waiting in the wings to devour their kill. The deer is forgotten as soon as they leave the corpse, other instincts rising to the surface to take the place of the joy of the hunt.

Meg runs in front of him then, bursting into a small clearing that she’d claimed for her own long ago. Not even her father and brother know about it, only her grandfather. She springs onto the sweet, green grass and changes as soon as her paws touch down. It only takes a moment before she shrinks and crouches, pale and naked in the sunlight, fingers scraping through the dirt instead of claws.

When she rolls onto her back, she sees Castiel staring at her, his triangular face tilted to the side, pale eyes shining. The blood staining his sandy fur fills her nostrils and she bares her teeth in a half smile, the hunt still singing through her veins and urging her to move.

He feels it, too, she thinks. He changes in front of her, ignores his nakedness and runs across the clearing, as swift on human feet as he is as a cat, and covers her naked body with his own. There’s blood on her face, too, and on her hands and belly. It mingles with the drying blood on his own skin, and in his mouth, she can taste it on his teeth. They suck leftover strings of raw flesh from each other and Meg can feel her skin humming with a different kind of magic, her blood singing with a different kind of need, just as urgent as the need to hunt but so much _more._

He moves with the same urgency, and when she moves her hands across his back, she can almost feel his blood singing with it, too. Blood is everywhere, under her nails and in her mouth and in her belly. They lick it from each other’s arms and fingers and faces as they move together in the sunlight, gasping and moaning and clawing at each other like wild animals.

When it’s done Meg pushes Castiel from her and rolls onto all fours, changing again in an instant and rushing for the woods. He follows her, purring loudly, and they run until their legs give out and their muscles are screaming.

He nuzzles her, afterward, and Meg watches as he changes again, growing larger until he’s human once again. She follows, lying naked in the leaves and panting hard, until he smiles and kisses her, soft instead of needy.

“Thank you.”

Meg smiles back at him as the sun sets, casting shadows across the ground. The dirt turns cold under her, but she cannot find the strength to move.

“Run with me,” she says. _Stay with me._ “Run with _us._ You need it, Cas. We all do. Embrace it.”

He nods and falls beside her in the dirt, streaks of blood still standing out against his skin. The dirt mixes with it, making him look more animal than human, and Meg’s just fine with that. Because they’re not human, not really. Just beasts walking around in human skin, waiting to get out.

He struggles to his feet and holds his hand out for her. Meg takes it without question and lets him haul her to her feet, curling her toes in the dirt.

“You’re right,” he tells her. “It’s better this way. Embracing it.”

Meg smiles. The moon shines down on them, nearly full. Her skin tingles with the promise of running with her family the next night, but she ignores it, focusing on Castiel instead, and rests her hand on her belly.

Their line will continue. Her father needn’t have worried after all.

“Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow and run with all of us. Hunt with all of us. Be one of us.” He grips her fingers harder and turns to lead them back to her house, back to humanity. She digs her heels into the dirt and refuses to move until he answers her. “Castiel, say it.”

His blue eyes are wide and scared, but Meg calms him with a kiss. When she pulls away, he smiles.

“I will.”

She smiles back, and allows him to lead her through the woods.


End file.
